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Contents lists

T. E. Lawrence to Mrs Thomas
Hardy

Karachi

15.1.28

Dear Mrs. Hardy

This
is Sunday, and an hour ago I was on my bed, listening to
Beethoven's last quartet: when one of the fellows came in and said that
T.H. is dead. We finished the quartet, because all at once it felt like
him: and now I am faced with writing something for you to receive three
weeks too late.

I was
waiting for it, almost. After your letter came at Christmas I wanted to
reply: but a paragraph in the papers said that he was ill. Then I held
my breath, knowing the tenuous balance of his life, which one cold wind
would finish. For years he has been transparent with frailty. You,
living with him, grew too used to it perhaps to notice it. It was only
you who kept him alive all these years: you to whom I, amongst so many
others, owed the privilege of having known him.

And
now, when I should grieve, for him and for you, almost it
feels like a triumph. That day we reached Damascus, I cried, against all
my control, for the triumphant thing achieved at last, fitly: and so the
passing of T.H. touches me. He had finished and was so full a man. Each
time I left Max Gate, having seen that, I used to blame myself for
intruding upon a presence which had done with things like me and mine. I
would half-determine not to trouble his peace again. But as you know I
always came back the next chance I had. I think I'd have tried to come
even if you had not been good to me: while you
were very good: and T.H.

So,
actually, in his death I find myself thinking more of you. I am well
off, having known him: you have given up so much of your own life and
richness to a service of self-sacrifice. I think it is good, for the
general, that one should do for the others, what you have done for us
all: but it is hard for you, who cannot see as clearly as we can, how
gloriously you succeeded, and be sure how worthwhile it was. T.H. was
infinitely bigger than the man who died three days
back - and you were one of the architects. In the years since The
Dynasts the Hardy of stress has faded, and T.H. took his
unchallenged - unchallengeable - place. Though as once I told you, after a
year of adulation the pack will run over where he stood, crying 'There
is no T.H. and never was'. A generation will pass before the sky will be
perfectly clear of clouds for his shining. However, what's a generation
to a sun ? He is secure. How little that word meant to him.

This
is not the letter I'd like to write. You saw, though, how I
looked on him, and guessed, perhaps, how I'd have tried to think of him,
if my thinking had had the compass to contain his image.

Oh,
you will be miserably troubled now, with jackal things that don't
matter: you who have helped so many people, and whom therefore no one can
help. I am so sorry.

T. E.
Shaw

Source:

DG 564-5

Checked:

dn/

Last revised:

5 January 2006

T. E. Lawrence chronology

﻿

1888 16 August: born
at Tremadoc, Wales

1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys

1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909

1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British
Museum's excavations at Carchemish

1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo

1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt

1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference

1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office

1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF

1923 January: discharged from the RAF

1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps

1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant

1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah

1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven
Pillars, published

1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey

1929-33: stationed at Plymouth

1931: started working on RAF boats

1932: his translation of the Odyssey published

1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe

1935 February: retired from the RAF

1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May

1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset

﻿

This T. E. Lawrence Studies website is edited and maintained by
Jeremy Wilson. Its content draws on the research archive
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